Why did the U.S. government sterilize thousands of Native American women in the 1970s? New Mexico is investigating

In the 1970s, the U.S. agency that provides health care to Native Americans sterilized thousands of women without their full and informed consent, depriving them of the opportunity to start or grow families.

Decades later, the state of New Mexico is set to investigate that troubling history and its lasting harm.

New Mexico legislators approved a measure this week to have the state Indian Affairs Department and the Commission on the Status of Women examine the history, scope and continuing impact of forced and coerced sterilizations of women of color by the Indian Health Service and other providers. The findings are expected to be reported to the governor by the end of 2027.

“It’s important for New Mexico to understand the atrocities that took place within the borders of our state,” said state Sen. Linda Lopez, one of the legislation’s sponsors.

It’s not the first state to confront its past. In 2023, Vermont launched a truth and reconciliation commission to study forced sterilization of marginalized groups including Native Americans. In 2024, California began paying reparations to people who had been sterilized without their consent in state-run prisons and hospitals.

The New Mexico Legislature also laid the groundwork to create a separate healing commission and for a formal acknowledgment of a little known piece of history that haunts Native families

Sarah Deer, a professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, said it’s long overdue.

“The women in these communities carry these stories,” she said.

Outside of a 1976 U.S. Government Accountability Office report, the federal government has never acknowledged what Deer calls a campaign of “systemic” sterilizations in Native American communities.

The Indian Health Service and its parent agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on New Mexico’s investigation.

A troubling history

In 1972, Jean Whitehorse was admitted to an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico, with a ruptured appendix. Just 22 and a new mother, Whitehorse said she remembers experiencing “extreme pain” as providers presented her with a flurry of consent forms before rushing her into emergency surgery.

“The nurse held the pen in my hand. I just signed on the line,” said Whitehorse, a Navajo Nation citizen.

A few years later when she was struggling to conceive a second child, Whitehorse said she returned to the hospital and learned she had received a tubal ligation. The news devastated Whitehorse, contributed to the breakdown of her relationship and sent her spiraling into alcoholism, she said.

Advocates already were sounding the alarm about women like Whitehorse who were entering IHS clinics and hospitals to give birth or for other procedures and later finding themselves unable to conceive. The activist group Women of All Red Nations, or WARN — an offshoot of the American Indian Movement — was formed in part to expose the practice.

In 1974, Choctaw and Cherokee physician Connie Redbird Uri reviewed IHS records and alleged that the federal agency had sterilized as many as 25% of its female patients of childbearing age. Some of the women Uri interviewed were unaware they had been sterilized. Others said they were bullied into consenting or misled to believe the procedure was reversible.

Uri’s allegations helped prompt the GAO audit, which found that the Indian Health Service sterilized 3,406 women in four of the agency’s 12 service areas between 1973 and 1976, including in Albuquerque. The agency found that some patients were under the age of 21 and most had signed forms that didn’t comply with federal regulations meant to ensure informed consent.

GAO researchers determined that interviewing women who had undergone sterilizations “would not be productive,” citing a single study of cardiac surgical patients in New York who struggled to recall past conversations with doctors. Because of the lack of patient interviews and the narrow purview of the GAO’s audit, advocates say the full scope and impact remains unaccounted for.

A venue to tell their stories

Whitehorse didn’t share her experience for nearly 40 years, she said. First, she told her daughter. Then, other family.

“Each time I tell my story, it relieves the shame, the guilt,” Whitehorse said. “Now I think, why should I be ashamed? It’s the government that should be ashamed of what they did to us.”

Whitehorse now advocates publicly for victims of forced sterilization. In 2025, she testified about the practice to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and called for the United States to formally apologize.

Whitehorse hopes New Mexico’s investigation will offer more victims a venue to tell their stories. But advocates like Rachael Lorenzo, executive director of the Albuquerque-based sexual and reproductive health organization Indigenous Women Rising, say the commission must be careful to avoid re-traumatizing survivors across generations.

“It’s such a taboo topic. There’s a lot of support that needs to happen when we tell these traumatic stories,” said Lorenzo.

In a New Mexico legislative hearing earlier this month, retired Indian Health Service physician Dr. Donald Clark testified that he has seen patients in their 20s and 30s “seeking contraception but not trusting that they will not be irreversibly sterilized” because of stories quietly passed down by their grandmothers, mothers and aunts.

“It’s still an issue that is affecting women’s choice of birth control today,” Clark said.

A pattern of disenfranchisement

A 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell upheld states’ rights to sterilize people it considered “unfit” to reproduce, paving the way for the forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, disabled people and other disenfranchised groups throughout the 20th century.

According to Lorenzo and Deer, the sterilization of Native American women fits into a pattern of federal policies meant to disrupt Native people’s reproductive autonomy, from the systemic removal of Indigenous children into government boarding schools and non-Native foster homes to the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which prevents tribal clinics and hospitals that receive federal funding from performing abortions in almost all cases.

In Canada, doctors have been sanctioned as recently as 2023 for sterilizing Indigenous women without their consent.

Deer said New Mexico’s investigation could pave the way for accountability. But without cooperation from the federal government, Deer said the commission’s fact-finding abilities would be limited.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com